Apr 14, 2015

Plank 0.9.0 Released With Window Dodge Hide Mode

Plank is a simple, lightweight dock / task manager written in Vala. The application, which is available by default in elementary OS, features multiple hide modes, customizable screen position, theme and icon size, supports pinning apps to the dock, quicklists and more.

Plank 0.9.0 as released a couple of days ago, bringing new features and bug fixes, such as:

new smooth animations for actions like adding and removing items;

added Window Dodge hide mode (the dock will hide if it obstructs any window);

it's now possible to set a hide delay;

Plank now provides a simple dbus-interface with some methods for remote-controlling;

It's also worth mentioning that Plank was added to the official Ubuntu repositories with the latest Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (to be released later this month).

Install Plank 0.9.0

elementary OS Freya, released a few days ago, ships with Plank 0.8.0 however, the latest Plank 0.9.0 should already be available as an update. Note that the new 'Window Dodge' hide mode is not displayed in the elementary OS System Settings yet.

While Unity users already have a dock available by default (the Unity Launcher), Plank can be a useful addition to quite a few desktop environments like GNOME (Shell), Xfce, MATE (Ubuntu MATE 15.04 ships with Plank but it's not used by default) and so on. To install Plank in Ubuntu (Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, etc.) from its stable PPA, use the following commands: